iOS 8 Has Amazing Credit Card Scan Feature

There are few things in this world that are more annoying than trying to type in your credit card information on a phone. You might get a digit wrong or you might drop a connection and, moments later, you’re back trying to peck in the info all over again. Apple’s working to solve that nightmare in Safari in iOS 8 by using your iPhone’s camera. If you’re more cavalier there’s always auto-complete, though I prefer to keep that data to myself.

9to5Mac recently discovered a new feature in Safari that allows you to choose an option to “Scan Credit Card” during a check-out process. If you select it, you’ll then position your credit card inside of a box that appears in your camera viewfinder to automatically gather your credit card data. Safari will gather your credit card information and then place it in the appropriate fields in the check-out form, totally eliminating the pecking scenario I described above.

Apparently web developers won’t need to do anything and this feature will work right in Safari without any back-end changes. iOS 8 is set to launch this September, so unless you’re using the beta you’ll need to wait a few more months to take advantage of the new feature.